Wow.... me in the home workshop forum, thats scary considering I cant even hammer a nail straight.

Anyway, putting in some of that Expol type insulation under the house, and theres a label on it saying to use polyester tape to cover any electrical cabling near the Expol to prevent possible arcing - fair enough.

But how many layers of polyester tape do I need ? Just a single layer is enough ?

Also, Im planning on running CAT5 through the same area, do I need to insulate that with tape as well ? One of the cables will be PoE for the Unifi AP.

The problem is the PVC will mix with the polystyrene and make a sticky mess that has lower insulation properties and may fall apart if moved after its sucked all the plasticisers out of the PVC cable insulation.

Same as when people put computer stuff back into polystyrene packaging without the plastic bag and the cables go all gross.

Not sure what the tape is made of to stop it happening, most insulation tape is PVC as well so I would have thought it would be affected too.

There's brown wax-paper type stuff in each packet of Expol. Looks pretty low tech but presumably it does the trick if they include (imagine the lawsuits if it failed and led to a fire. I usually use PVC insulation tape to hold the wax-paper in place, that way the wax paper is doing the isolation between materials, and the insulation tape is redundant once the polystyrene wedges the wax paper in place

Edit: I have heaps left over as there was only 2m of electrical cable under the house (mostly wired in the ceiling) so could post it to you in an envelope if you need extra, or looking to complete this stage of the job before filling your house with large polystyrene bricks

Twitter »

Follow us to receive Twitter updates when new discussions are posted in our forums: